Quiz: The Pieces Everything Is Made Of

Several years ago, Randall Munroe, the creator of the Web comic “xkcd,” published his own blueprint of a Saturn V rocket, the launch vehicle that sent the Apollo astronauts to the moon. He called it “Up Goer Five.” The blueprint, he explained in a parenthetical note, was annotated “using only the ten hundred words people use the most often”—that is, the thousand most common words in English. It was aerospace engineering made simple. The rocket’s tower-jettison motor became the “thing to help people escape really fast if there’s a problem and everything is on fire so they decide not to go to space.” The Apollo command module became the “people box.”

This week, Munroe will publish “Thing Explainer,” a compendium of blueprints and diagrams in the spirit of “Up Goer Five.” Like any good work of science writing, the book is equal parts lucid, funny, and startling. The explained things include cells (“tiny bags of water you’re made of”), a microwave (“food-heating radio box”), an airplane cockpit (“stuff you touch to fly a sky boat”), a particle collider (“big tiny thing hitter”), and a tree (“tree”). Last week, he explained Einstein’s general theory of relativity.

We decided to adapt one of Munroe’s diagrams as a quiz. Since this is the Elements blog, what better choice than the periodic table of elements? (Or, in Thing Explainerese, “the pieces everything is made of.”) See if you can guess the correct elements based on Munroe’s drawn or written clues.

Please enable JavaScript to view this feature.

Illustrations by Randall Munroe / Development by Derrick Koo

The New Yorker offers a signature blend of news, culture, and the arts. It has been published since February 21, 1925.